Scholars have long taken interest in the conversion of African slaves to Christianity in the New World which have mixed, to one degree or another, African religious forms with Christianity. The process has been studied in greatest depth by sociologists, such as Roger Bastide, anthropologists like Melville Herskovitts or art historians such as Robert Farris Thompson. Although the most devoted of the scholars concerned with this have not been historians, and much of the basic research has been in current practices rather than historic origins of African and Afro-New World religions, all scholars share some vision of the historical process. In this vision African and European religions and world views meshed in a past which is far beyond the memory of modern informants and probably dates back to the early days of Afro-European contacts.

Scholars of the British experience in Latin America have given considerable attention to the adventures of the two Scottish merchants John Parish Robertson and his brother William, who visited Paraguay between 1811 and 1814. The image of the taciturn Dictator José Gaspar de Francia attempting to use the two British subjects to establish commercial links with Europe has appeared in virtually all histories of the period. Francia's failure in this regard, we are frequently told, ushered in a period of self-imposed isolation for Paraguay. Few foreigners, merchants or otherwise, were permitted to breech the barriers set up by the Dictator and Paraguay quickly took on the reputation of an “inland Japan.” That these barriers were not as absolute as the traditional portrayal would suggest has been established only in the last fifteen years. With few exceptions, the historical accounts have assumed that, with the departure of the Robertsons, British merchants lost all interest in Paraguay. In fact, however, a strong desire to “open” the trade of that country characterized the British mercantile community of Buenos Aires throughout the life of the Dictator and, on one occasion at the very end of Dr. Francia's reign, a concerted effort was made by certain Britons to reintroduce British commerce to Paraguay.

The existence of racial democracy in Brazil has long since come into serious question. The work of sociologists like Florestan Fernandes and historians like Carl Degler has demonstrated the fact of racial discrimination in Brazil, yet the history of race relations in Brazil still seems to stand in contrast to that of the United States. Occurrences of widespread racial violence and the organization of militant movements for social, economic, and political equality take up little space in the historical literature dealing with Brazil. The apparent lack of endemic racial conflict in Brazil has been explained as the result of the marginalization of black people in Brazilian capitalism or as the result of a social mechanism like Degler's “mulatto escape hatch,” which separates the mass of black people from their natural leaders. Consequently, a consciousness of racial solidarity did not develop as the basis for political organization. Without such organization, black people could not effectively confront the white power structure on the issues of race, and, ultimately, class discrimination.

The massive efforts of the Bourbon monarchs of the late colonial period to give their Spanish-American empire a modern state apparatus, extract more revenues from it, and defend it effectively from foreign interlopers involved an unprecedented assertion of royal authority at all levels of government, including the local one. Municipal government throughout the Americas became both an object of reform and one of the chief instruments of Bourbon reorganization at ground level. All the major activities and changes that required direct contact with the general population, from the taking of censuses and the establishment of militia units to the imposition of new taxes and the reorganization of the colonial financial structure, depended on municipal governments for their effective implementation. When the world wars for empires among Britain, France, and Spain reached a crisis stage for the Bourbons with Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808, the municipal governments became even more vital to the maintenance of the viceroyalties and the survival of the Spanish monarchy.

By the turn of the seventeenth century a generation of Andean natives, both Inca and aboriginal, had made lifelong homes within the strongholds of the European invaders. As they entered old age they inhabited an urban landscape whose “Indian” sector had become very diverse. In Quito and other colonial cities some of them dwelled in old pre-hispanic settlements whose closeness to new Hispanic centers had turned them into multiethnic “Indian” ghettos. Quito's Añaquito and Machángara are examples. Many others had settled illegally but permanently inside the Spanish nuclear city, so much so that in the 1580s Spaniards remarked on the growth of a “big shanty town” in its midst. Notarial records show, too, that center city streets housed colonies of “Indian” artisans specializing in European arts like iron working, embroidery, and tailoring. Rich enclaves of Inca and aboriginal nobles lived close to Spanish clerics and officials. Specialist traders delegated by native lords, and native entrepreneurs in the Spanish economy, rented permanent workplaces and dwellings downtown. Finally a large contingent, especially of women, lived as servants or concubines in Spanish houses or had usufruct of separate urban houses. In 1600 there were probably more different ways to be an urban Indian than there are today.